phpBay Pro Tips

Archive for July, 2008

Don’t you hate it when your phpBay auction results have aLl sOrTs oF FuNnY CAPITILIZATIONS? It makes your site look very unprofessional.

Ebay sellers do all sorts of crazy stuff to get their auctions to stand out. And unfortunately, there auctions show up as-is on your phpBay sites. Until now.

Allan Lewis of Handy Hints for New Webmasters created a plugin that converts all your wacky phpBay auction results titles in normal, title case results.

The plugin is super easy to use. Get the phpBay title fixing plugin.

Thanks Allan!

Today Wade released a new version of phpBay Pro for wordpress. The new version is 3.0.5. I just upgraded ad one of the cool new features is the “best match” sort option for your eBay results. This should help you get more relevant auction results on your phpBay sites.

If you are still on 3.0 and you missed the last few small updates, there are a few other minor updates. First, you no longer need iconotube. You can delete it from your root folder when you install 3.0.5.

Also, you no longer need to create a license file and upload it. You just need to enter your license key from your phpBay admin account.

Read about all the additions to phpBay on the phpBay forums:

Read about updates in 3.0.5
Read about updates in 3.0.4 
Read about updates in 3.0.3
Read about updates in 3.0.2
Read about updates in 3.0.1

I always get people asking me how I set up my phpbay sites to look like real websites and not blogs. One of the best ways to make you phpBay site look like a real website is to be smart how you organize your posts and pages.

How do you do that? First of all, make your home page display just one page or post. There are a few ways to set that up. You can create your homepage content with a page, or with a post.

Before we get into that, download the Flexi Pages Widget. That’s what I use to display my pages in my sidebar. Add it to your sidebar and edit the settings so that “List sub-pages only in parent and related pages in hierarchy.” Is checked off. This lets you hide the sub pages under each page until that page is clicked, then it expands and shows the sub pages. That’s what I used on Discount Golf Balls.

How to use a Page for you phpBay Site home page
If you want to make it with a page, here’s what you do (in wordpress 2.5+). First, create a page and for the title, use your headline you want on the front page.

Now go to Settings>Reading and then where it says “front page displays” select “a static page” and then from the drop down list pick the page name you just created (the headline of your homepage). (more…)